I was thinking about narrative and the phrase “there are no new tales left to tell” and its myriad variations.
Looking into it, someone was suggesting writing in “the quiet, eerie margins” was a writing space left largely untapped. Described as: “It is the difference between a sudden, violent storm (the loud center) and the heavy, electric stillness in the air just before the barometer drops (the quiet margin).”
Of course, I’m curious about your thoughts.
Are there truly no new tales left to tell? Is everything derivative? Can you think of a story that doesn’t have an easy analogue?
Or, how would you interpret writing “in the quiet, eerie margin”? Do you have a different description or opinion? Where would you start if you were writing in/of the margin?
It started about the time I quit smoking, so I always joke that if you gave me a cig, I’d talk your ear [edit: that should be “your shirt”] off while attempting to sell you your own shirt back to you. Or: I blame it on the lack of a smoke, anyway. Either way, it feels like something about smoking made it easier to talk to people.
My other jest: if you put me in front of a microphone and expect me to give a presentation, hand me a guitar as well and I’ll knock it out of the park. It’s more lie than reality, but I could probably give better presentations with a guitar in hand.
Now I fumble over the simplest chatter.
Was it that cigarette? Or was it just having a prop in my hands? A drag on the cigarette as a visual semicolon, gathering my next words before speaking with dramatic tension built up before the exhale and finishing my thought?
Or was it something that helped me focus? I’ll admit my mind is a restless thing, that smalltalk tends to make it wander. I’ve not made it a secret that I’m impatient with extended smalltalk. Was smoking what made it easier to keep my mind on track for social niceties?
Perhaps I should try holding a pen when I go to social gatherings. A toothpick? A fidget toy in my pocket — only someone is apt to notice the movement and think you are diddling yourself…
If I could only manage to avoid putting my foot in my mouth for an hour and then never managing to extract it, but just switch the position as I blush more an more with it sitting there for all to see. Ha ha ha. Ugh.
I’m still one-day-at-a-time with the smokes after well over a decade. I might be an alcoholic still, but I rarely think about finding a drink after roughly the same amount of time. It’s all: Smoke smoke smoke, how can I justify a smoke?
Maybe that’s all this really is, if I’m honest with myself. An excuse looking for a problem.
Maybe all I really need is some more practice being social. Shudder.
Maybe not.
But, man, I do miss that little extra bit of income from selling shirts.
I recently had a lengthy discussion with someone who wanted to share with me their amazing mind-expanding experiences with psilocybin. This person had “an awakening” after the experience and wanted me to hear their version of “the good word”.
I won’t go into the details of their belief system, as it is really unimportant. People believe what they will believe and I try not to judge what they believe, although his awakening is based quite heavily on the use of hallucinogens and convoluted conspiracy theories treated as science by merely applying the word “science” to the material.
Anyway, I think he was trying to get me to join his psilocybin community. Most people would jump at the chance, honestly. Not interested, personally.
No angry so much as just exhausted by trying to live in a world that doesn’t seem to much care for you or what you do? A world that insists you stay in your place at the margins because your clockwork is not in full synchronization with all the other Barbie and Ken influencers that get paid to try to turn us into a commercial product (or, at least, someone who endlessly consumes)?
Or, maybe just weary at being the only person who believes in holding doors open for another person (regardless of gender), or letting a car merge ahead of you in rush hour traffic (typically to get the bird flipped at you because you slowed down to do so)?
Or maybe trying to do something other than what a prompt into an AI chatbox can do: music, writing, art, opinion, philosophy, (or, I don’t know, make the sparkliest rhinestone jacket anyone has ever rhinestoned), what have you — only to see people cheer on AI slop or write a “roses are red, violets are…” composition while you are greeted with crickets? And a jacket Liberace would have envied.
Or where someone says “It’s been a while since we spoke,” acting as if it was more like “last winter”, but was closer to 20 years? And then thinking it will be as if it were last winter indeed, when you know for a near fact that you might not speak for another 10 years after they satisfy their need to say they kept in touch, or discover that you can’t go back after 20 years with the click of twin ruby slippers and chant, “there’s no place like home”.
You get a choice most of the time: take one pill to buy into the delusion and conform. Or take the other pill and stay beyond the pale.
Looking at one hand, then the other. Pausing. Contemplating. Navel gazing. Philosophizing…
Eh, fuck ’em. Toss both pills over the palings, ignore everything and walk the thin, liminal places they ignore. Piss on it all.
Giving name to a musical project should be easy, right?
No. It never is.
It’s worse than naming a character in your story. Or a fictional place.
Everyone should be named Bruce and Sheila, and everyone should live on Main Street in Greenville. Sometimes I even write stories with placeholders like that.
See how simple that was?
But if I want to start a musical project… Eeesh. All the good ideas are taken.
I swear this is the absolute truth.
I bet there’s even a band named “Bruce and Sheila” (google tells me there are gospel groups performing under that name — several of them, in fact — so there goes that idear).
If you were starting a band that did coldwave/darkwave music, what would you call it? Be silly. Be creative. Be deadpan serious. I honestly want to see your ideas below. It could be educational. I’ll even give you kickbacks after my first half-million if I use it.
I’m sure Greenville is probably taken and isn’t all that coldwave, so don’t suggest it, please.
You know how it is. Sometime you just feel a little more crow, is all. People think you have to feel raven all of the time, but piss on that. Occasionally I feel more crow.
More than usual, lately, to the point that I wonder if I am maybe crow pretending to be raven. Or, possibly… a sideways shift…
I might be fox, but three of them woke me up with their screaming last night under my window, so I’m not so certain I am not fox. Seems mighty rude to wake someone up when they are sleeping just to tell them they are fox. Yet — I feel more fox because of it and that’s because they’ve made my full yard their hunting grounds of late. Not that I can complain, except when they wake me up to say, “Hey, fox brother, come hunt with us after midnight. A juicy mouse for you if you come outside.” Except in blood-curdling scream in the voice of an 8-year old. And not in English.
Crow is laughing at that this afternoon. “Goodness, kid. They got you to thinking they were just some neighborhood younglings when they woke you up. Best. Joke. Ever.”
I flipped them off. More giggle fits.
”You know, I was meant to be working on being Stone. A spider told me so.”
”Yeah. About that. Fox, you see, had other plans.”
”Obviously.”
“Well, sweet dreams. I hope the fox screams don’t keep you up tonight.”
And they flew off, laughing.
”Well maybe I don’t feel very crow either,” I shout out at them. “Maybe I feel more fox than Raven, Stone OR Crow. How does THAT make you feel?”
”Sounds sensible to me,” muttered Mr. Waddles, the resident possum as he waddles away. “Fox has always got something up their sleeve. I’m not sure you can ignore them. Even if you try.”
And then he crawled under the shed and munched grubs.
I’m trying new things, not all of them visible. Some, right now anyway, are exclusive to me. They are not secrets, just not established stuff.
The story I’m playing around with, for example. That’s a bit of early chaos theory applied to writing. As I tried to explain in my comment is that the sentence structure is like driving in rush hour traffic and, at the very last second, swerving to take the exit. From four lanes over. Swerve fiction, if it has a name. It might have teeth. Probably not, but it had an interesting set of premises when it was brainstormed out and I like interesting challenges.
I’m also getting back to physical media instead of digital writing. I’m playing around with mixing freeform writing with doodles. I’m no artist, but I’m trying to shake up the old thinking processes by messing with around with the mechanisms to break out of deeply ingrained habits.
Other things as well. I need to shock that monkey mind.
Summer solstice is nearly upon us and I am challenging my thought processes about the marking of the day like I have continuously since I started down this little tumble-worn path of mine going on close to forty years ago.
Aside from October 31st, I have largely moved away from the merged eight-fold seasonal holiday structure and compressed it to observing the two solstices in my own way, and giving nod to the equinoxes when I can. The remaining three are a different kind of observed holiday than I am into embracing after all this time of serious pondering. Interesting in their symbolism, but ultimately not part of my crooked, winding path.
I was thinking (dangerous stuff, that) about totems last night after waking up (this morning?) to use the toilet and after laying back down and trying to find a comfortable position to grab another ninety minutes of shuteye before dealing with the day.
I wonder, at times, if there are truly no new tales to tell or does everything always sound familiar? What does it take to break that glass barrier? Or is it a concrete barrier we try to push past and discover new tales or, at least, new ways of telling the old tales and speaking the old verse?
